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Many companies know your personal browsing habits

Maybe today you read a post on your favorite blog and the article had a YouTube
video available with it (which you didn't watch), and then you
looked at a few friends' profiles on MySpace, and then you shopped
for political books on Amazon. Of course, you know that
the blog knows which article you read, and MySpace
knows who your friends are, and Amazon knows the types of
books you were looking at.

However, even though you never used Google today, Google
knows the article you read, the friends whose profiles
you looked at, and the books you are thinking about buying.

How does Google know? Your browser told them.

When you read that blog post, the blog's website
told your browser to request files from YouTube even though
you didn't watch the video. YouTube is, of course, owned by Google.
So, your browser dutifully
let YouTube know which article you were reading as it grabbed files
from YouTube (such as the still image to display to entice you to
watch the video).
And when you were on MySpace looking
at friends' profiles, MySpace told your browser to request
files from Google Analytics, a web traffic analysis service
run by Google. So, your browser then told Google Analytics about each
MySpace page that you visited. And then, when you were browsing
for political books at Amazon, your browser was told to
make requests to DoubleClick, an advertising company owned by Google,
and Google got to know which books you are interested in.

Take back control

It makes sense that your browser would only be communicating with the
website whose domain you see in the address bar at the top of your browser.
However, as we can see, that's not the case. We can, though, with a little
extra effort, take back control over which websites our browsers
communicate with.

This browser extension, RequestPolicy, makes it so that you decide when
your browser should obey commands by one website to make requests to other
websites. By being able to decide this, you have more control over which companies
know your browsing habits, your interests, and the great amount of other
information that can be determined based on knowing how you spend your time
online.

Allowing only images-amazon.com when at amazon.com

Allowing only myspacecdn.com when at myspace.com
(Shown with the alternative status bar icon.)

Is Google evil? Are they the only one?

No, Google isn't evil. And, no, they aren't the only company doing this.

Google wants to know everything that happens. They're amoral, not immoral.
The data is useful to their company and they'll use it if you give it to them.
You just might not want to be part of their data set.

And Google isn't the only one, by far. Yahoo and Microsoft have similar ways of
knowing about people's browsing habits through their own ad networks
and other services that rely on browsers making third-party website
requests that are destined for their websites. There are also many other smaller companies and websites that
are in similar positions to be able to know some of your browsing habits.